Burning Ship: Self-Defence and the Use of Force

About this Project

By Craig Forcese

In 2018, I published "Destroying the Caroline: The Frontier Raid that Reshaped the Right to War" with Irwin Law. This book examines the origins of the international law standard for state self-defence against an armed attack.

As a collateral project, and under the leadership of Peter Knowlton (then a JD/MA candidate at uOttawa/Carleton), this dataset project collected state documents concerning several state use of force. These documents were "coded" to determine to what extent states voiced concepts drawn from the law of self-defence.

The results are reproduced in this database as "exhibits" by use of force event. Click on "Browse Exhibits" to see the incidents in the database.

Time and resources permitting, I may add new events to this database.